The Wire-master (Bute) and his Puppets. (London, 1767.)
"The power behind the throne greater than the throne itself."
A large proportion of the very caricatures of the period have something savage in them. A visitor to the library of the British Museum curious in such matters is shown ten huge folio scrap-books full of caricatures relating to this reign, most of them of great size and blazing with color. From a gentleman who recently inspected these volumes we learn some particulars showing the bad temper, bad manners, and bad morals of that time, all three aggravated by a king whose morals were excellent. One of the first to catch the eye of an American is a picture, of date about 1765, called "A New Method of Macarony-making, as practiced in Boston, North America," which represents two men tarring and feathering another, who has a halter round his neck. Of the pictures reflecting upon Lord Bute and the Princess of Wales nothing need be said except that they are such as might be expected from the caricaturists of that age. Many of the works of Gillray in the earlier years of George III. were of such coarseness, extravagance, and brutality that the exhibition of them nowadays would subject the vender to a prosecution by the Society for the Suppression of Vice. Our informant adds: "Their savageness and filth give one a very curious idea of the taste of our grandfathers and our great-grandfathers, only our ancestors, male and female, could hardly have been as bad as they are represented. Such hideous faces, such deformed figures, such monstrous distortion and debasement, such general ugliness and sensuality, oppress one with a feeling of melancholy rather than exhilaration. You might as well be merry over the doings of Swift's Yahoos, who are certainly not more offensive than some of Gillray's men and women. Whether in home or foreign politics, he is equally unscrupulous."
Charles James Fox was the bête noire of Gillray. He delighted in depicting him and his friends in as odious a light as possible, giving him huge beetle-brows, heavy jaws, and a swarthy complexion. The famous Westminster election, at which the beautiful Duchess of Devonshire won a vote for Fox by giving a kiss to a butcher, supplied him with a rich source of caricature. Fox is drawn riding on the back of the lady; and again, sitting in a tap-room with the duchess on his knee; and in another picture, hobnobbing with a coster-monger, while the duchess has her shoes mended by a cobbler, and pays the cobbler's wife with a purse of gold. Fox chops off the head of the king; he is a traitor, a republican, a Jacobin, a confederate with the French, a forestaller, a buyer-up of corn with which to feed the enemy, a sot, a gambler—every thing that is bad. His very death-bed forms the subject of a brutal caricature. The noblest traits of his political character are the points satirized. His great crimes apparently are that he loved freedom abroad as well as at home, that he strove for peace with France, and endeavored to do justice to Ireland. For this he is depicted as the secret ally of Bonaparte and as the instigator of Irish rebellion. The ghosts of Lord Edward Fitzgerald, Wolfe Tone, the Sheares brothers, Emmett, and other Irish martyrs are made to pass before Fox's bed, and point to him as the cause of their rebellion and their fate. When Burke went over to the Tories he then became the favorite of Gillray, who before had generally represented him as a Jesuit, because he demanded justice for the Catholics. Now he is the savior of his country, and the terror of Fox, Sheridan, and Priestley. Sheridan is depicted as a blazing meteor with an extremely rubicund nose. There is a picture of the Titans attempting to scale heaven, in which George III. figures as a comical Jupiter launching his thunder-bolts at the Whig Opposition. Queen Charlotte is shown as a miracle of ugliness. The prodigality of the Prince of Wales, who first appears as a handsome young man with long powdered hair, totally unlike the high-shouldered, curly-wigged, royal Turveydrop of later days, is contrasted in companion pictures with the alleged parsimony of his parents. He is represented reveling with inordinately fat but handsome women, who get drunk, hang round his neck, and indulge in familiarities. The popular hope that marriage would reform him suggested a large drawing, in which the slumbering prince is visited by a descending angel in the likeness of the unhappy Caroline, at whose approach a crowd of reprobates, male and female, hurry away into darkness. Thomas Paine did not escape. In a picture entitled "The Rights of Man; or, Tommy Paine, the Little American Taylor, taking the Measure of the Crown for a New Pair of Revolution Breeches," he is represented as the traditional starveling tailor, ragged and slippered, and armed with an immense pair of shears. He crouches to take the measure of an enormous crown, while uttering much irrelevant nonsense. This precious work is "humbly dedicated to the Jacobin clubs of France and England."
Bound with such pictures as these are a vast number by inferior hands, most of which are indescribable, the standard subjects being gluttony, drunkenness, incontinence, and fashion, and these in their most outrageous manifestations. They serve to show that a stupid king in that age, besides corrupting Parliament and debauching the Press, could demoralize the popular branch of art. The visitor, turning from this collection of atrocities and ferocities, finds himself relenting toward the unfortunate old king, and inclined to say that he was, after all, only the head noodle of his kingdom. Every improvement was mercilessly burlesqued—steam, gas, the purchase of the Elgin marbles; popular prejudices were nearly always flattered, seldom rebuked; so that if the caricatures were of any use at all in the promulgation of truth, they served only as part of the ordeal that tested its vitality.
We do not find in this or in any other collection many satirical pictures relating to the revolution which ended in the independence of the American colonies. There was, however, one gentleman in London during the earlier phases of the dispute who employed caricature and burlesque on behalf of America with matchless skill. He is described in the London Directory for 1770 in these words, "Franklin, Benjamin, Esq., agent for Philadelphia, Craven Street, Strand." The effective caricature placed at the beginning of this chapter was one of the best of a long series of efforts to avert the impending conflict. He loved his country with the peculiar warmth that usually animates citizens who live in a distant outlying province. His country, when he designed that caricature and wrote the well-known burlesques in a similar taste, was not Pennsylvania, nor America, nor England, but the great British Empire, to which William Pitt, within Franklin's own life-time, seemed to have given an ascendency over the nations of the earth similar to that which Rome had once enjoyed. It was, however, only on the coast of North America that Britain possessed colonies loyal and free, not won by conquest nor by diplomacy, and therefore entitled to every right secured by the British Constitution. Franklin loved and gloried in this great country of which he was born a citizen. He deplored the measures that threatened the severance of those colonies from the mother country, and would have prevented the severance if the king's folly had been any thing short of incurable. The most wonderful thing in the whole controversy was that the argument, fact, and fun which Franklin wrote and inspired, from 1765 to 1774, had only momentary influence on the course of events. "Against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain."
The Gouty Colossus, William Pitt (Lord Chatham), with One Leg in London and the Other in New York. (London, 1766.)